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Nicolas Winding Refn turned down a place at the prestigious National Danish Film School in order to write and direct his 1996 feature film debut, PUSHER. Violent, edgy, yet emotionally gripping, it established him as an uncompromising new talent. Over the next fifteen years, films such as BRONSON, VALHALLA RISING, and the PUSHER trilogy demonstrated a mastery of intense, visceral tales that explored haunted characters navigating the consequences of their own immorality. With his latest film, DRIVE—winner of the Best Director Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival—Refn has reached a new level of international recognition, where future projects are eagerly awaited and past works invite reappraisal and discovery.

Thu, Mar 8, 2012
at 7 PM

Fri, Mar 9, 2012
at 7 PM

PUSHER

DIRECTOR: NICOLAS WINDING REFN DENMARK, 1996

Frank, a small-time drug dealer, is about to experience the worst week of his life. After a complicated heroin deal goes wrong and he loses both the money and the merchandise, Frank finds himself massively in debt to the Balkan drug baron Milo. The squeeze is on, and as the week passes, the pressure mounts, with Frank trying to repay the money in the face of Milo’s increasing frustration and his own latent self-destructiveness. Frank launches one last desperate push to raise the missing funds, but it appears less and less likely he will emerge from this hellish week unscathed. “The film practically vibrates with youthful aggression, sly humor, and gathering tension, hurling itself forward like a junkie toward the next fix.”—Los Angeles Times (105 mins.)

A run-in with a baseball bat has left Tonny, a small-time crook from the Copenhagen underworld, with his brain scrambled and a bit unreliable. Just released from prison, he tries to bring order to his life and gain the respect of his father, the Duke—a notorious gangster who appears to have only contempt for his son—but nothing in life is coming easy. Trying to repay a debt, misstep after misstep puts him further afoul of the Duke, and on top of it all, Tonny faces the responsibility of supporting a baby that may or may not be his own. Battling the scorn of all around him, as well as his own drug-fueled delirium, Tonny must find the path to redemption or die trying. “Each film in Refn’s mesmerizing, brutal PUSHER trilogy can stand on its own, but it’s fun to see all three and observe the way the bad guys in one become the sympathetic heroes (or anti-heroes) in another.”—David Edelstein, New York Magazine (100 mins.)

PUSHER III takes place over the course of a single day, with the now middle-aged Milo struggling to prepare his daughter’s 25th birthday party. As Milo fights his own personal demons in the form of a smack addiction he’s trying to kick, his business day proves equally challenging once a shipment of ecstasy arrives in place of the heroin he was expecting. Forced to contend with a new order of young hoods in order to move this designer drug he knows little about and feeling the squeeze he himself has put on so many before him, Milo must find a way to maintain his place of dominance atop the Copenhagen underworld. To do so, he will have to survive one of the most harrowing episodes of his long, illustrious career. “Given an appetite for grisly crime flicks, [the PUSHER films] make for a delectably nasty epic.”—Nathan Lee, New York Times (100 mins.)

Mall security guard Harry Cain’s wife is mysteriously murdered in Wisconsin. Compelled to find out why, he begins his own bizarre investigation, obtaining information that leads him to Montana in search of the supposed murderer. But he soon learns that things are seldom what they appear to be. Refn’s first English language film stars John Turturro, Deborah Kara Unger, and James Remar in a “thriller ingeniously woven with motifs suggesting the difficulty of seeing and understanding truth and substituting psychological chills for commonplace gore.”—David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor. “Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through FEAR X like a toxic mist.”—Steven Holden, New York Times (91 mins.)

For years, the fearsome proto-Viking figure known only as One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen, PUSHER) has defeated everyone he has encountered, but he’s treated more like an animal than a warrior. The only person he has any relationship with is the young boy who brings him food and water daily. Constantly caged and shackled, One Eye has drawn the attention of a new force now sweeping the countryside and displacing the society’s leaders: Christians. VALHALLA RISING is a visual tour-de-force that mediates violent intensity with subtle introspection. “Refn, the prankster of last year’s BRONSON, has never reduced his craft to such a sledgehammer of minimalism. Electric guitars drone on the soundtrack, bones crunch, and a mystical religiosity gathers around One Eye; there’s a midnight cult here for those who yearn for one.”—Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (93 mins.)

In 1974, a misguided 19-year-old named Michael Peterson decided he wanted to make a name for himself and, with a homemade sawn-off shotgun and a head full of dreams, attempted to rob a post office. Swiftly apprehended and originally sentenced to seven years in prison, Peterson has been behind bars for 34 years, 30 of which have been spent in solitary confinement. Based on Peterson’s real story, BRONSON, with an intelligent, provocative, and stylized approach, follows the metamorphosis of Mickey Peterson into Britain’s most dangerous prisoner, Charles Bronson. “Jaw dropping. Awesome ... a stylish thrill ride.”—Time Out New York. “BRONSON owes a little or a lot to Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, but if that’s a crime, I wish more people would commit it.”—Andrew Oheir, Salon (92 mins.)

Refn combines a slick, neon-lit aesthetic with a pulsating synth score and a bad-ass swagger, paying homage to Euro-crime icon Jean-Pierre Melville and auteurs of LA noir like Michael Mann and William Friedkin, but in service of something uniquely his own. Ryan Gosling turns in an electrifying performance as the Driver: Hollywood stuntman by day, getaway driver by night. His world is upended when he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son, who represent an alternative to his otherwise stoic existence. Featuring great supporting turns from Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as Hollywood mobsters, DRIVE is a lean, mean machine with no time for the sort of baggage that might slow its exhilarating forward momentum. “As the film accrues intensity and awakes the demon lurking inside its protagonist, you can see it as something more than a retro-cool crime story. Rather, it’s a parable of good and evil and the nature of man.”—Shawn Levy, The Oregonian. “Here is a movie with respect for writing, acting, and craft. It has respect for knowledgeable moviegoers.”—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (100 mins.)